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Seagate Announces 750GB Hard Drives

Hack Jandy writes "Seagate documents have leaked out the two 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda hard drives. The drives are the first desktop hard drives to use perpendicular recording, feature a 16MB cache and 7200RPM spindle."

12 of 532 comments (clear)

  1. Great! by dcapel · · Score: 5, Funny

    We can finally Get Perpendicular!"

    --
    DYWYPI?
    1. Re:Great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      I see how it works! A magical disco ball is allowed to emit it's soooper groovy radiation over the surface of the disc, which liberates the bits to stand up and boogie! It's so obvious!

      Of course, you have to thicken up the dance floor, but that's elementary.

      Still, I can't believe that there wasn't a single black bit there at the Super-Para-Magnetic Disco...

  2. Re:Thats a lot of pr0n by amspencer · · Score: 5, Funny

    I suppose that why it has perpendicular recording.

  3. wow by bensafrickingenius · · Score: 5, Funny

    that will hold almost half of my porn!

    --
    I am not left-handed, either!
  4. Wow! by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Wow, and here we thought that 640k is enough for everybody!

    Each time the capacity of hard drives goes up a few gigs, I think back to the day in the mid 90's when I got my first "gig" hard drive for $500. Wow, it was the most incredible thing to be one of the first people in my neighborhood to have so much storage... I didn't think I'd ever run out of that much space. And today, the OS won't even fit into such a thing.

    But let's put this huge capacity into perspective: Having once had to reverse engineer an obsolete 3.5" floppy drive to repair an obsolete piece of industrial machinery that was down (the customer couldn't afford to replace the whole machine because of a failed floppy drive, and the OS loads from floppy of all things), I learned that this contraption, which was on the market in the 80's, was really incredible, if you take a step back and think about it for a minute. Then, all it takes is a moment to realize that hard disk drives are several orders of magnitude more complex. First, the density of a floppy drive is nothing compared to that of a hard disk even from a decade ago, and secondly, the linear motion of the reading head on a floppy is controlled by a simple stepper motor, whereas the round motion of the reading heads on a hard drive is controlled by servo. I mean, just stop to think about it for a moment. All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.

  5. Re:Great for backups by nblender · · Score: 5, Funny
    When you buy your TB-iPod, it will come preloaded with the entire history of human musical creativity and you will buy unlock codes with iTunes.

    (from a co-worker)

  6. Re:Great for backups by bensafrickingenius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later."


    I'm sorry, but I really think you're mistaken. I and those in my field are caught in a seemingly unending storage excalation war. We provide 500 megabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 50 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 500 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. Sure, they're wasting A LOT of space, and we could slow down the rate of growth by running scripts to delete MP3s or whatever every night, but that's a stopgap measure, and in the end is probably more expensive in terms of costly technician time than the cost of just slapping more drives in our Promise array. Currently we're backing up all of our servers to a 6.5 TB array via rsync -- and it's getting full. Give me a petabyte disk, please!

    --
    I am not left-handed, either!
  7. Re:16MB of Cache? by ZorbaTHut · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They're becoming IO-bound far faster than cache-bound. It takes literally hours to read an entire 500gb hard drive at this point. The cache, on the other hand, is staying roughly on par with the IO speed, which seems like a more natural combination.

    --
    Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
  8. Re:How do I back it up? by Tatarize · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oddly enough, the reason it's good these fancy huge hard drives come out is not just to use them, but rather to drive the price of the reasonable drives down. $60 250 gigs here I come.

    --

    It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
  9. Re:But what about... by onx · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, it should considering that according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS [wikipedia.org] states that the maximum volume size for an NTFS volume is 16EiB. One exibyte is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, so 16 exibytes = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes. Since a 750GB hard drive should hold approximately 750,170,112,000 bytes, an NTFS volume should be able to handle 24,590,081 of those 750GB hard drives in a RAID array. Now assuming a RAID array can handle that many of these drives, and that this new 750GB hard drive merely takes the price spot of Seagate's current finest offering of a 500GB hard drive (priced on newegg as $295 each) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822148108 [newegg.com] rather than debuting at a higher price point, which it probably will, that many hard drives would cost about $6,147,520,250 before tax, and not including any of the massive discounts one might expect to recieve for such a massive purchase. On top of that, at a sales tax rate of 7.75%, the tax on those drives would cost you $476,432,819.38. So I don't know about you, but I doubt this is going to be a problem for either XP or Vista for a long, long time (assuming you use NTFS partitions).

  10. Re:How do I back it up? by matt21811 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So true.
    One bad thing is that the growth of large drives seems to have slowed down dramtically in the last few years and as a consequence the improvment in bang per buck of "normal" drives has also slowed down.

    I've been studying this for a while now. You can see the trend for youself at my site, http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html

  11. Re:Format this Red Hat! by Alioth · · Score: 5, Informative
    Eh? What are you wittering on about?
    [alioth@ZenIV ~]$ df -h
    Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
    /dev/sda3 8.2G 1.3G 6.5G 17% /
    /dev/sda1 494M 52M 418M 11% /boot
    none 1014M 0 1014M 0% /dev/shm
    /dev/sda5 4.1G 57M 3.8G 2% /tmp
    /dev/sda2 9.2G 3.8G 5.0G 43% /usr
    /dev/sda7 9.8G 2.4G 7.0G 25% /var
    /dev/md0 461G 182G 256G 42% /home
    /dev/md1 1.1T 547G 499G 53% /archive
     
    [alioth@ZenIV ~]$ grep md1 /etc/mtab
    /dev/md1 /archive ext3 rw,noatime 0 0
    See that there at the bottom? 1.1T. This is larger than 750GB. It is formatted ext3. The machine is running RedHat.